A Hard Witching

by Jacqueline Baker

  Jacqueline Baker

  A Hard Witching

  and other stories

  for my mother,

  and for Gabrielle & Julian

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Cherry

  Lillie

  Redberry, Ministikwan, Buffalo Pound

  A Hard Witching

  The Ghost of Ingebrigt Lake

  Small Comfort

  Bloodwood

  Sand Hills

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise for A HARD WITCHING AND OTHER STORIES

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Cherry

  I

  He was our great-uncle (younger than my grandfather by a number of years, we were surprised to learn at the funeral), though Max and I always called him, simply, Uncle Aloetius. Because we spent long, dull summers with my grandparents, and because Uncle Aloetius was retired from his job at the pottery in Medicine Hat and now lived in the same small town near the hoodoo-like hills of the South Saskatchewan River valley, we saw quite a lot of him, though we never knew him well, never settled into the kind of teasing friendliness we enjoyed with my grandmother’s brothers from distant Gravelbourg. And though Max and I never talked about it, I think we shared the same uneasiness about Uncle Aloetius, a result of more than just his disturbing habit of leaving the top two buttons of his trousers undone to accommodate the gout that had swelled his belly round and hard as a pumpkin—something Max and I might have found funny in someone else, someone other than Uncle Aloetius, with his tobacco voice and the fine purple veins cracking across his nose like lightning, and the way he would drop a meaty fist onto the table unexpectedly when talking, making the coffee cups jump and rattling us all in our chairs.

  Despite his habit of blowing his nose loudly into a hanky at the supper table, despite his German accent (inexplicably heavier than our grandfather’s), despite the tufts of hair on his knuckles and in his ears, Uncle Aloetius occupied a position outside our mockery of grown-ups, our low-grade jokes about smells and scabs and bodily functions. For this alone, this impossibility of caricature, we may have respected him, may even have liked him a little—wanted, in fact, to like him. And he, in turn, may have wanted us to. But there was something about Uncle Aloetius that defied both affection and ridicule. He would try to tease us, try to joke with us the way our grandfather did, easily, the way our other uncles did. But his humour always fell flat, as if he did not quite believe in it himself.

  “Bet you a quarter you can’t tear this leaf in half,” he said one morning; not a jest, a demand. Betchu a kvotteru cant dare dis leefenhuff.

  He held the poplar leaf out toward Max, who was sitting on one of the cinder blocks Grandma used to pot her geraniums. Max looked at me, then took the leaf in his palm carefully, as if it were a green heart, still beating. He fingered it briefly, squinted up at Uncle Aloetius and handed it to me.

  “Right in half,” Uncle Aloetius stressed. “Right down the middle there.”

  I used my thumbnails to edge minutely, painstakingly, down the spine, staying impeccably true to the line of it. Max breathed heavily, nostrils whistling, over my shoulder.

  “Oh-oh,” Uncle Aloetius said every few seconds, when it seemed I might falter.

  I had to tilt the leaf away from the reflection of the sun to see the spine clearly. My elbows were propped on my knees to steady me; my hands kept from trembling through sheer force of will. When I was finished, I handed over the two perfect halves.

  “That’s good,” Uncle Aloetius said, studying them carefully. “Pretty good.” He held one half up. “That’s a good half.” Then, tearing that half in two, he added, “Here’s a quarter.”

  When Uncle Aloetius didn’t joke, when he talked to us seriously, as an adult would, there was something else, not quite cruelty, but something like it.

  “Bet you can’t guess what I got here,” he said to us one afternoon, coming into my grandparents’ yard with a small cardboard box under his arm.

  It was Thanksgiving weekend, and though it was cold, Max and I sat on the gravel driveway, idly throwing stones onto the roof of the garage.

  No, we confessed uneasily, we couldn’t.

  “Come on, now,” he barked, “just guess.”

  Max looked at me as if he might cry. Uncle Aloetius had played this game with us before. Chances were, whatever was in the box was something alive, or something that had recently been alive or, worse still, only a part of something that had recently been alive: gopher tails (ten cents apiece ven I vus your aitch, enuff to pie a new pair uff shews); the grey, pointed head of a sturgeon he’d caught in the river; a rattle from the snake he’d run over on the highway.

  “I don’t know,” I said slowly, trying not to imagine the terrible options. “Partridge feathers?”

  “Partridge feathers,” he scoffed, and shook his head. He settled the box on the gravel and pried the lid off with the tip of his walking stick. “Have a look.”

  Max remained stolidly near the garage, but I took a step or two forward, thinking, Please God, let it not be a snake, anything but a snake.

  I peeked into the box. It wasn’t a snake, it wasn’t alive, and it hadn’t been alive recently, not by any stretch of the imagination. I wrinkled my nose, leaned away slightly, hoping Uncle Aloetius wouldn’t notice. Made confident by the fact that I had not shrieked or bolted, Max sidled over.

  “Ew,” he said simply.

  Uncle Aloetius frowned at us, annoyed and disappointed. “A skull,” he said, as if we didn’t get it. “Look at those teeth there.”

  Reluctantly, we looked. They were blackened and broken and clamped in a vicious grin. I considered, briefly, the awful possibility of a tongue.

  “Bobcat,” he said proudly. Popcat. “Here.” He held it out to us. Max and I stepped back. “It’s petrified,” he stressed, and tapped his knuckles against his forehead. “Like wood.”

  Petrified.

  “Like a vossle,” he added.

  Max and I blinked.

  “A vossle,” he shouted. “Don’t they teach you that?”

  Max sniffled, grabbed the hem of my shirt. Of course, I knew he meant fossil, but I couldn’t admit this, knowing it would make him even more scornful. In dealing with Uncle Aloetius, we’d learned, there was a measure of safety in ignorance. He was more willing to give up if he thought us merely stupid.

  “What the Christ do they teach you?”

  Max always cracked under the pressure.

  “Pictures,” he bawled, “with macaroni.”

  Uncle Aloetius, still holding the skull forward, scowled at the two of us, stared at my hands fixed firmly in my pockets, at the snot pooling above Max’s quivering lip. Then he packed up the skull and hobbled off toward home, stabbing the air with his walking stick every few steps, as if still making his point.

  Uncle Aloetius lived across town in a small grey stuccoed house flanked by several overgrown lilac bushes and filled with his collections, things he’d found while walking the Sand Hills or down by the river or in the fields blown smooth in spring. Pieces of things: skulls, bones and skins. They ranged across shelves and counters and window ledges, were nailed to walls, rested unexpectedly in kitchen drawers and closets and dressers. Not that Max or I ever ventured far during our visits to Uncle Aloetius’ house, choosing to remain quietly perched on either side of our grandfather like bookends. But we were occasionally sent to fetch some small item—more mix from the back bedroom, the calendar from the kitchen cupboard, a deck of cards, or a knife, or a glass—a task that would most often end in an unhappy discovery of some sort.

  It was always me, not Max, who made these discoveries.
Being older, I didn’t mind so much that I was the one appointed to run the errands. Foraging in dark bedrooms and closets would have been easier, though, if Max had come with me. At first I bullied him into it, staring fiercely at him until he slid from his seat and followed me from the room.

  “Just reach in there and find the bottle opener,” I said one time, pointing to the kitchen drawer, which we’d been able to wedge open only a few inches before it stuck.

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Your hand’s smaller.” I lifted my hand, spreading the fingers wide. “See?”

  Max stared.

  “Hold up your hand, Max.”

  Max stuck both hands firmly down the front of his pants.

  I knew not to force the issue. If he cried, things would go worse for us with Uncle Aloetius and with my grandfather, too, who suffered our squeamishness only in small and sporadic doses.

  I slipped my hand into the drawer, shuddering as I felt around, recognizing objects by touch—scissors, a pen, rubber bands, nothing worse than that. When I found what I thought was the bottle opener, I slid my hand out quickly, relieved. But it wasn’t a bottle opener. I had grabbed instead the handle of a small hairbrush, a soft blue enamel one rimmed with a border of white vines. A woman’s brush. And I thought immediately of Uncle Aloetius’ wife, Cherry, whom I knew only through photographs. At any other time, I would have been thrilled to find the brush, fascinated as I was by her, by her long absence and, because of it, her perpetual youth. But on that day I was too dismayed at the thought of having to slide my hand back into that drawer to pay much attention to a hairbrush. That day, it was merely another strange item in an already strange house.

  When I finally found the opener, I puffed out a great sigh of relief.

  Max pulled his hands from his pants and said, “See, they’re not smaller.”

  “Next time,” I said firmly, as we returned to the living room, “it’s your turn.”

  From then on, Max gazed stubbornly back at me whenever I was called on to fetch something, and I ended up going miserably alone.

  There was one place in Uncle Aloetius’ house even I would not go, upon pain of death.

  “You know what’s down there?” Uncle Aloetius would say each visit without fail, nodding toward the door—latched shut with hooks at both the top and bottom—leading from his kitchen to the root cellar.

  Max and I shook our heads, though of course we knew. How could we forget?

  “Do you?” he’d demand.

  “Children,” Max would say, chin trembling. “Lots of them.”

  What kind of children?”

  “Bad ones.”

  “And were you good this week?”

  God, yes, we hoped so.

  Naturally, we had questions about these children—How many? Where did they come from? How old were they? and the one that gripped Max: Where did they go to the bathroom?—questions we broached in bed at night with the blankets pulled up over us like a tent and Max’s feet pressed against my belly, or, more often, safely by daylight. But they were questions we would never ask Uncle Aloetius.

  We did, after much deliberation, ask my grandmother one morning while she mended clothes in front of the TV.

  “It’s those Germans,” she said, as if that explained everything. “Just look,” she added, “at their fairy tales.” She bit a thread between her broad front teeth, teeth we always thought looked like Chiclets. “Russian Germans,” she said, meaning Grandpa and Uncle Aloetius, “they’re the worst.”

  “Are we Germans?” Max asked after a moment. “Russian Germans?”

  “Part,” she said. “A quarter.”

  Max started to cry then. Grandma put down the work sock she was darning, pulled out the damp wad of Kleenex she always kept balled up in her sleeve (the same Kleenex? we often wondered) and wiped at Max’s face.

  “Oh, now,” she said, “that’s just foolish.”

  For a long time, though, we weren’t sure whether she meant the possibility of children kept chained for years in Uncle Aloetius’ cellar or simply Max’s tears.

  But Max was like that. There was always a certain element of desperation to his fear that made me sorry for him on those visits to Uncle Aloetius’ house, sorrier than I was for myself. I could, for instance, almost feel the trembling of poor Max’s limbs through the plaid chesterfield when Uncle Aloetius addressed either of us. Uncle Aloetius must have sensed it, too, smelled the fear coming off Max like the panic off a trapped rabbit. And he must have despised it.

  “Max,” he said unexpectedly one night, as he and my grandfather leaned over a card table playing rookie, “get my glasses from the bedroom.”

  It was quite late on an evening in December, and the house was dark except for the old teardrop floor lamp that stood in the corner behind Uncle Aloetius’ chair and the faint, almost-pretty green glow of the neighbours’ Christmas lights coming through the front room windows layered over heavily with ice. “The Little Drummer Boy,” our favourite carol, played softly on the turntable, but sounded fuzzy because Uncle Aloetius needed to replace the needle. Every so often it would skip, and either Grandpa or Uncle Aloetius would thump his boot against the floor to fix it. The air was stuffy and old, and my skin itched hotly beneath my long underwear. Neither Max nor I had removed our parkas, and we held our toques and mittens between our knees hopefully, as though we would be leaving any second.

  “Max,” Uncle Aloetius repeated, “go get my glasses.”

  Max did not move. Though I couldn’t see his face from where I was sitting on the other side of Grandpa, I knew how he would look, his lips stretched tight and pale with anxiety.

  “I’ll get them,” I offered quickly.

  “Max can do it,” Grandpa said reasonably, taking a drink from the tumbler of warm rye and coke at his elbow. He shuffled neatly through the deck a couple of times with his thumbs and looked down at Max, who still had not moved.

  “Max!” he said.

  I clenched my jaw, knowing Max would cry, knowing his tears would bring all kinds of anger and derision down upon both our heads: the candy-assed kids from the city, the crybabies, the chickenshits.

  “Get Uncle’s glasses,” Grandpa barked, elbowing Max in the shoulder. “What are you waiting for?”

  I looked across the table at Uncle Aloetius, expecting that old scornful look of disdain. But he was staring at my grandfather, looking at him with a raw kind of emotion, part resentment, part relief, his face open like a wound. And I thought, for the first time, with absolute amazement, They’re brothers. I was so shocked to think of them that way, to make such a blood discovery, so embarrassed to see Uncle Aloetius naked, almost needful, that, without thinking, I grabbed at my grandfather’s wrist.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

  But no one heard me. On the turntable, the record had begun to skip at the chorus. Max stood, paused a moment, not looking at anybody, and then walked slowly down the dark hallway toward the bedroom, his snowsuit rasping with each step, the record continuing to skip and the three of us staring after him, as if we were momentarily suspended and preserved in that cold green winter light.

  When Max returned, grim-faced, glasses in hand, Grandpa thumped his boot against the floor, and the music and the card playing resumed, steadily, as if nothing in that room had changed.

  II

  They were the only boys in a family of five, one of those typical Saskatchewan farm families, except that neither Grandpa nor Uncle Aloetius ever had any interest in farming. So when the time came, the land was divided among the three girls and their husbands—who did want to farm, as the girls were quick to point out—and the boys were left to make their own ways. Grandpa got on almost immediately with the R.M. (meaning, Grandma explained, “rural municipality,” not “arm,” as Max and I had thought), doing road service, a good, steady job, and Uncle Aloetius wandered around to Kindersley and Swift Current and Lethbridge, finally getting work at the pottery in Medicine Hat, where h
e settled. It wasn’t clear exactly where he’d met Aunt Cherry, but she was with him when he arrived in Medicine Hat. They rented a tiny apartment across from the old stockyards on Foundry Street and were married soon after, at the family homestead in Saskatchewan. They did not linger after the wedding, but returned to the city and their little apartment, which no doubt stank all day of manure and slaughter.

  They wouldn’t have seen much of each other in those early years, Grandpa and Uncle Aloetius. Holidays maybe, the occasional weekend, more often once Grandpa bought a car. Everyone thought Uncle Aloetius had moved to Medicine Hat for good. Even after Cherry left, no one expected him to come home. And he didn’t. I imagined him alone in that little two-room apartment, smelling the hot dark smell of animal flesh that got into his clothes and his hair and his skin, that left a faint taste in the food he ate; imagined him listening all night to the moaning of cattle penned shank to shank in the heat and the rain and the snow, and beneath that another sound, lower, the constant hum of flies. No one could figure out what made him stay, but stay he did.

  So when he bought that little house just four blocks from Grandpa, turning up one day with his belongings packed roof-high into the back of his old white Pontiac, we were all surprised. “Why would I live there,” he said in response, meaning Medicine Hat, “when I can live here at half the price and none of the headache?” For Uncle Aloetius had never made any bones about his distaste for the city, in spite of the fact that he’d lived there nearly forty years.

  “Those people,” he’d say in disgust, and swat his hand through the air.

  By the time Aunt Cherry had left Uncle Aloetius to go back east to Ontario, Grandpa had met and married Grandma. They had three children, two who died in infancy and the third, my father. This was after the war, during that brief time of good rainfall and good wheat prices, and Grandpa and Grandma were busy managing their own lives, their little family. Grandpa built them a house across from the lumberyard—a small two-storey frame house—and planted an enormous garden out back from which Grandma put up pickles and preserves each fall. From what my grandmother told me in later years, it sounded like a good life, though her memory might have been taking the edge off things, as memory does.